Footsteps in the Furrow. Andrew Arbuckle
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in the period when the price of grain was good and money was invested in agriculture. Where there was an adequate flow of water, these early models used it as a power source, but for the majority, power came from horses or cattle harnessed to a central drive shaft walking round and round. There are still a number of these horsemill hexagonal shaped buildings in farm steadings in the area.
The next development was the travelling mill, which was powered by steam. One of the first travelling mills was paraded through Cupar in 1851, on its way to a number of smaller scale farms that could not afford their own mill. The framework of the travelling mills was wood and often they were painted salmon pink with red post-office coloured frames. The travelling mill was a specialist two-man operation, moving from farm to farm, with the mill pulled by a steam engine. During transit, these vehicles also had a small wooden bothy linked to the back of the mill.
Most mill men did not go home in the week and they ate and slept in their temporary home.
Often this forerunner of the modern-day road train was further lengthened with the addition of a straw baler. The weight of the mill, baler and caravan could total 8 tons, or 7.2 tonnes. Such was the damage done by this heavy machinery to primitively tarred roads in the early days of the century that proposals were made to ban the vehicles.
The National Farmers Union and the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture both took up the cudgels on behalf of travelling mills, arguing they were essential to the farming economy. Seeking a compromise, local authorities then suggested that the vehicles could move early in the day or late in the evening – both times were chosen because tar on the road would be harder than under the midday sun when it could be torn up by the large iron wheels. As it was, the mills often moved after working a full day, reaching the next farm for a 5 a.m. start the following morning.
All this debate was forgotten when the threat of war and the need to produce food overcame the niceties of road repair. There were also issues over who was allowed to drive. One tale relates how the driver had the licence but it was the second man who had responsibility for steering. This latter task was made no easier due to the poor turning circle of steam engines.
Often the mills were owned by large scale contractors, with several units parked up out-of-season. One recollection is of a whole field of mills and balers in a field on the outskirts of Stirling.
On arrival at the farm and on setting up the machine, the first essential was to ensure the mill was completely level. This was achieved by the use of a spirit level on the main frame. Jacks and wooden blocks were placed under wheels to help the levelling process. Normally the setting up was done when the mill arrived in the evening and the first job of the day for travelling mill men was getting the engine steamed up, using coal from the farm where the threshing was to take place.
Food was also supplied from the farmhouse to the team working at the mill, although this little act of generosity came under fire in the hungry post-World War II years. Some Union members felt they should not have to feed mill men and the custom ought to be discontinued. The problem, they stated, was they were getting no extra food rations for this service.
Numbers working at a thresh could vary, but there would be one man on the stack, with another forking the sheaves precisely to the mill man, who knew exactly how important it was to feed them evenly into the big beater drums. Lumpy or uneven delivery could throw the drive belts as the drum tried to deal with a thick wedge of un-threshed sheaf. The mill man carried a special cutting knife with a slightly hooked end for the sheaves; sometimes the sheaf knife was part of a special glove. He would normally feed the sheaf head first into the drum, but if the straw had to be bunched, then the sheaf would be entered lengthwise. Feeding the mill was a dangerous job, with limbs sometimes lost in the rapidly rotating threshing drum.
Many of the mill men wore red-and-white spotted hankies around their necks to prevent grains and barley awns going down their shirts. Often they also sported eye protectors made of close mesh wire to stop grains that pinged out from the fast rotating threshing drum.
Other staff had to deal with all the output of the mill, with two of them kept busy with the straw bunches that had to be carried away to the straw stack or ‘soo’. Likewise, two women would gather up the chaff in big jute sheets and take it to the cattle courts or henhouses.
The men bagging off the grain had to be hardy; they also needed to be very much aware of the main driving belt flapping away between the mill and the steam engine as such modern-day frills as guards were not deemed necessary. Health and Safety concerns were not so tightly observed in those days and horrific tales circulated of people being beheaded by these belts.
In a big day at the mill, the men bagging off the grain could handle some 200 sacks. These were not 50-kilo bags if wheat was being threshed; the sacks held 112 kilos, which sometimes then had to be carried up the loft steps to the granary. Barley was bagged in 100-kilo sacks, while oat sacks were a mere 75 kilos. The sacks consisted of heavy-duty jute and were supplied by the railway company, who would count on transporting the finished product to the mills and to the maltsters.
When the bags were full, little slides shut down the flow. The sack of grain then went onto the steelyard to be weighed and any small adjustments were made with a metal scoop and a spare basin of grain. After being tied with twine, the sack was lifted with a chain-and-ratchet barrow onto the shoulders of the man deputed to carry it away. A cheaper system was an old fork shaft and an empty barrel. Two men held either end of the shaft and tipped the full bag over it. It was then relatively easy to lift the sack between them onto the upturned barrel. Chaff could be blown directly into cattle courts or into sheets, which were then taken away for bedding. The straw came out, either into a baler or a buncher. If wheat straw was straight enough to be used for thatching or covering potato pits, it would be bunched.
Apart from the replacement of the horse by the horsepower of the tractor, harvesting of grain remained largely unchanged for the first half of the twentieth century. When horses pulled the binders, the driving mechanism came from the wheels of the binder. Thus, three horses were often needed to pull the binder. Much of the remaining work in the harvest field, such as the stooking and the leading off, remained the same until the advent of the combine harvester.
The first of the new generation of these machines to come into Fife was delivered to Messrs Cheape, Strathtyrum, St Andrews, in 1938. It was a Massey Harris without any distinctive red company livery. Instead, the main panels were of galvanised metal. This metal attire encouraged sceptical, possibly envious neighbours to call it the ‘white elephant’.
By that time, however, combines had been working in other parts of Scotland and had shown the potential for revolutionising the harvesting of cereal crops. The first of these came to Scotland in 1932. It was a trailed Clayton harvester, which was brought by Lord Balfour to his estate in East Lothian.
By 1944, in the later years of the war, Fife had eight combine harvesters, leaving the vast majority of the crop still being taken in the traditional manner with binder and threshing mill. Not everyone was overawed by the new combines: that same year, East Fife Young Farmers club held a debate about harvesting methods and those supporting the use of a binder won. Observing one of the first combines in the county working at the harvest at Frank Roger’s farm at Kenly Green, Kingsbarns, one of the main maltsters in the area described it as a ‘toy’.
Merchants were also worried about the germination of combined grain because the new method of harvest did not allow for a ripening period in the stook.
In the early 1950s, a well-known maltster – Alex Bonthrone of Pitlessie – told delegates at a college conference that he expected to see a swing back to the traditional binder, as there was a need for more orderly marketing of grain in post-harvest months. ‘I am sure we shall next year see the man with a stackyard coming back into his own,’ he claimed. Mr Bonthrone may have had that particular point wrong – never again was there a full stackyard in the second half of the last century. He was, however, very correct in a later comment in his speech when he said that there were always two points of view on malting barley: the farmers’ and the maltsters’. This still holds true in the first years of the current century. At the same meeting, my father – John Arbuckle of Logie – stated there was still